  Poetry
This week: Edited by: Ben Langhinrichs  
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The imagination is never governed, it is always the ruling and divine power.
John Ruskin, English art critic and poet
Greetings! I am a guest editor for the Poetry Newsletter, and I hope to share some of my thoughts on writing poetry, and perhaps about writing in general. I welcome your thoughts, feedback and suggestions. Ben Langhinrichs
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The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.
Ralph Nader, Consumer activist and occasional U.S. Presidential candidate
In defense of formal poetry
I find interesting parallels between the fashion world and the literary world. In both, there are movements and trends amongst those who are presumed to be experts. In both, the products of these experts cause a lot of head scratching and confusion amongst the ordinary consumers. In both, the confusion is somewhat intentional.
Years ago, ordinary people made clothing. Most families made their own working clothes, although some did buy the occasional dress or suit for Sunday church-going. Fashion trends moved very slowly, and had much more to do with warmth and propriety than with any special "fashion" sense. But since people did buy some clothing, and since manufacturing became available after the industrial revolution, a clothing industry developed, along with people whose expertise in clothing kept them employed.
But as more people bought manufactured clothing, and more manufacturers were able to create the same stylish and attractive clothing, the experts ran into a problem. There was less need for them. To create a need, they needed to come up with new and different styles, about which they still knew more. This worked for a bit, but then the clothing manufacturers caught up again. Back and forth they continued, until the fashion experts realized that the only way to stay ahead was to make styles that were intriguing, required expertise, but that nobody would ever wear. In that way, the manufacturers couldn't catch up, since they had no customers to buy these bizarre creations. At best, they could distill an essence of the latest fashions and make commercially viable clothing. This kept the experts busy and the manufacturers busy and the buying public entertained.
So, too, in the literary world. Writing was once practiced by any number of people, although not so many as those who made clothing since writing required education. Ordinary people without the benefits of our modern MFA programs managed to write exciting, accessible and meaningful poetry. Rules and conventions developed to aid these ordinary people in making extraordinary poems. Meter, rhyme and complex forms all shared the goals of sounding good while promoting warmth and propriety, much as clothing did. Expertise was limited by education and a lifestyle sufficiently free of work to allow time to learn the complex rules and styling for formal poetry.
But then education spread, first through the cities and then into every hamlet and village. Poetry seemed to be going the way of manufacturing, and the experts got scared. If everybody is taught rhyming and meter in elementary school, what distinguishes those who have spent their life at this? Every new form or trick was quickly copied by poets all over, and some used those forms and tricks to make great poems, better than those of the experts. So the experts came up with a plan. Create styles that were not accessible, not easily understood, not likely to be copied. Start literary magazines where this sort of poetry could be celebrated, but which people could read but not quite comprehend. Make esoteric new rules that could not be explained in elementary school, or even written down in many cases. Ordinary people who chose to write poetry would either fall back on the outdated and despised form poetry, or write free verse that didn't follow rules that nobody could understand. The experts were safe in their universities, jobs secured by writing poetry that nobody but other experts could understand.
Of course, there is one huge difference between the fashion and literary worlds. In the fashion world, there is little respect or attention paid to "old fashions" once they are gone. In the literary world, there is a huge body of work that risks being dismissed under the new rules. Poems by Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Frost, William Shakespeare: none met the new standards, but were revered by both the ordinary people and the experts.
So, an exception was declared, a "grandfather clause" you might say. Classic poetry could be revered, even though it violated the current trends and ethos, because it was classic poetry. Despite pooh-poohing rhymes in modern poems, Emily Dickinson's rhyming poems could be cherished. Despite looking down at meter and form, Shakespeare's sonnets could be taught and admired.
But we are free people. We, the great unwashed, poets of a new generation, do not need to heed the frantic snobbery of those desperately holding onto their mantle of superiority. Rather than futilely following with free verse that somehow never matches the unwritten rules, we can use the constructs of formal poetry to help our words sound lovely. Of course, we are free to write without form or meter or rhyme, but we should not be ashamed to use these tools, nor fear that we are not real poets. We should not accept the dictates of an autocratic educational elite anymore than we should wear the clothing paraded by anorexic models in Paris. We may, or may not, admire such displays, but we do not need to negate out own ability to create accessible, warm and meaningful poetry. We can strive to write classics today, rather than arbitrarily leaving the classics to our dead ancestors.
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Sonnet on love and loss
Sonnet on having an infant
Quatrain on boxing
Quatrains dedicated to Bob Dylan
An excellent contest to try
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Poetry: December 02, 2009 Issue [#3421]
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